OK this book started out interesting (mystery!), and then quickly became terrible. I might have been able to get over the heaven part, but there is just no way, I can get over the [SPOILERS] end where the way she makes peace is by possessing her friend's body to have sex with her boyfriend. WTF! I'm not sure what message this is trying to send ...? that we have to have sex before we die? that our life is only worth something if we've had sex with someone? that we must have sex with someone we like to grow up? I definitely am not a fan of any of those messages. And the using her friend's body to do it was kind of creepy and weird and I don't get why a book about rape would have that as an ending in a positive light?! This part completely surprised me and I nearly threw the book across the room in shock and horror. HOW did the author think this was a good way to end the book!? Why is this book even popular! ( )

Eh. It had some decent bits of writing, but that's about it. The plot is utterly ridiculous (particularly how it ended with all the icky consent issues and just plain bananas logic) and so many of the characters are caricatures. For example, Lindsay, the sister, becomes absolutely perfect in the wake of Susie's death, to the point of absolute irritation. The mum shows no personality at all, then runs away, and I don't care at all. Ruth is tuned to the moon. Literally the only tolerable, still-alive character is Susie's dad. Oh, and the dog. I liked the dog.

I don't know, it just seems like the author liked the gimmick more than she was invested in telling the story. Despite how cliche it would be, the story would be much more satisfying if it had ended with the bad guy getting properly caught and everyone living happily ever after and no weird ghost-rape. Then it would just have been an enjoyable, forgettable little mystery, instead of the hot mess it turned into. ( )

Although some sections tend toward melodrama... other passages are dreamy and lyrical. Most striking is Sebold's mastery of a teenager's voice, from such small details as Susie's Strawberry-Banana Kissing Potion to her completely believable thought processes.

Sebold takes an enormous risk in her wonderfully strange début novel: her narrator, Susie Salmon, is dead—murdered at the age of fourteen by a disturbed neighbor—and speaks from the vantage of Heaven. Such is the author's skill that from the first page this premise seems utterly believable... If in the end she reaches too far, the book remains a stunning achievement.

"My name was Salmon, like the fish: first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." Go ahead, read it again. Almost everything that makes The Lovely Bones the breakout fiction debut of the year — the sweetness, the humor, the kicky rhythm, the deadpan suburban gothic — is right there, packed into those first two lines, under pressure and waiting to explode.

The Lovely Bones is a quick, compelling read, and though it's not heavy, neither is it light summer reading. It's a slight, serious novel that almost comes across like a narrated photo album, with each searing, carefully selected image worth its requisite thousand words.

It's a risky novel that gracefully succeeds. One character mentions another character's gift for describing things that "made her feel as if she knew exactly what it felt like — not just what it looked like."

Which is what Sebold does so well, making readers feel what her characters feel — in life and death.

A luminescent debut novel that does something rare in the world of fiction—it conjures a fully realized imaginative universe that is both tangible and ethereal, creating a sublime friction between reality and ghostliness, the now and the nevermore.

Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf.

Quotations

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death brought were primarily that the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous lifeless body had been my life.

On her way home from school on a snowy December day in 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon ("like the fish") is lured into a makeshift underground den in a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer--the man she knew as her neighbor, Mr. Harvey.

Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, The Lovely Bones, unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case. As Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own version of heaven. Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams," where "there were no teachers.... We never had to go inside except for art class.... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue."

The Lovely Bones works as an odd yet affecting coming-of-age story. Susie struggles to accept her death while still clinging to the lost world of the living, following her family's dramas over the years like an episode of My So-Called Afterlife. Her family disintegrates in their grief: her father becomes determined to find her killer, her mother withdraws, her little brother Buckley attempts to make sense of the new hole in his family, and her younger sister Lindsey moves through the milestone events of her teenage and young adult years with Susie riding spiritual shotgun. Random acts and missed opportunities run throughout the book--Susie recalls her sole kiss with a boy on Earth as "like an accident--a beautiful gasoline rainbow." Though sentimental at times, The Lovely Bones is a moving exploration of loss and mourning that ultimately puts its faith in the living and that is made even more powerful by a cast of convincing characters. Sebold orchestrates a big finish, and though things tend to wrap up a little too well for everyone in the end, one can only imagine (or hope) that heaven is indeed a place filled with such happy endings. --Brad Thomas Parsons

Look Inside the Motion Picture The Lovely Bones (Paramount, 2010)(Click on each image below to see a larger view)

This is the tale of family, memory, love, and living told by 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who is already in heaven. Through the voice of a precocious teenage girl, Susie relates the awful events of her death and builds out of her family's grief a hopeful and joyful story.… (more)